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      The World of Kwame Nkrumah

       Pan-Africanism, Empire, and the Gold Coast in Global Perspective

      Many of us fail to understand that a war cannot be waged for democracy which has as its goal a return to imperialism. It is our warning, that if after victory, imperialism and colonialism should be restored, we will be sowing the seed not only for another war, but for the greatest revolution the world has ever seen.

      —Kwame Nkrumah, “Education and Nationalism in Africa,” 1943¹

      Brother, if any people need peace, it is Asians and Africans, as only a peaceful world will enable them to develop their countries and taste some of the good things of life which the West have long enjoyed.

      —George Padmore to Kwame Nkrumah, 1957²

      AT MIDNIGHT on 6 March 1957, Kwame Nkrumah stood on a stage in Accra’s Old Polo Grounds to usher in the birth of the new, independent Ghana and to announce his vision for the new nation. “Today, from now on,” he proclaimed, “there is a new African in the world and that new African is ready to fight his own battle and show that after all the black man is capable of managing his own affairs. We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, young as we are, that we are prepared to lay our own foundation.” He then continued his short celebratory speech with an all-encompassing call to action in the struggle for African self-determination: “We have done with the battle and we again re-dedicate ourselves in the struggle to emancipate other countries in Africa, for,” he emphasized, “our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.”³

      Nkrumah’s independence-day pronouncement connecting Ghana’s liberation to that of the rest of the continent remains one of the most famous declarations of Africa’s decolonization-era history. It ought to be read, though, on multiple levels—each of which reflects the intersecting array of audiences, networks, and histories of African and international anticolonialism into which the Ghanaian prime minister aimed to embed the young West African state. At one level, Nkrumah was returning to the roots of his own pan-African activism, cultivated under the tutelage of the Trinidadian pan-Africanist George Padmore in London and Manchester. In doing so, he aimed to adapt this largely diasporic tradition to the challenges facing what he and others predicted would become a rapidly decolonizing continent. At another, Nkrumah was also harkening back to the Gold Coast’s own political and intellectual tradition of anticolonial agitation. Rarely confining itself to the territorial boundaries of the colony, the political vision of the Gold Coast intellectuals and activists of the early twentieth century had taken shape as everything from nationalist to pan-West African to pan-African to even diasporic. As a result, during this period, figures including J. E. Casely Hayford, Kobina Sekyi, and J. B. Danquah, among others, positioned the Gold Coast at the political and intellectual center of early twentieth-century West African thought and activism. On yet another level, Nkrumah, with his pronouncement, sought to link Ghana’s postcolonial ambitions with a broader, indeed global history of anticolonialism extending back to at least the end of the First World War. For Nkrumah, this international anticolonialism provided a model for understanding the world and, in particular, a global political economy constructed out of the violence, iniquities, and relentless resource extraction of European capitalist imperialism.

      This chapter surveys the political and intellectual world that marked Nkrumah’s growth as an anticolonial thinker and activist. It, however, does not seek to offer a biography of the future politician’s early life but, rather, aims to present a transnational narrative that encircles Nkrumah as he came of age politically. More important than Nkrumah himself in the chapter are the multiple contexts—political and social, local and international—that surrounded the Gold Coaster during the first decades of the twentieth century, along with the various political and social networks that emerged out of them. These networks were colonial and extracolonial. They were also continental and transcontinental. Moreover, they were forged through the intersecting experiences of colonial subjecthood and racial exclusion already shaped by the global reach and impact of Euro-American ideologies of race, of colonial practices in labor and resource extraction, of social and political segregation, and even of, as Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton have argued, the shifting spatial dimensions of the emergent nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial world order.⁴ For those living within the empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the empires themselves were not always, or at least not entirely, mere spaces for passive exploitation. Rather, they also provided new arenas for political, social, and cultural connections, bringing together colonized peoples across seemingly disconnected spaces, as both peoples and ideas spread within and beyond the formal and informal confines of a given empire.⁵

      This chapter interrogates the processes by which competing yet intersecting political, social, cultural, and intellectual worlds came together to form the lively anticolonial politics of the first half of the twentieth century. In Africa and beyond, the interwar period in particular was a heyday of African and diasporic extraterritorial imaginaries. The result was a vibrant political and intellectual environment that included, among other things, a burgeoning pan-Africanism on the continent and abroad, a push and pull of competing notions of national and colonial self-determination, and a rising critique of the liberal underpinnings of the imperial system. Together, the formal and informal movements and ideas that arose out of these contexts comprised the political and intellectual backdrop that helped mold the worldview of the future Nkrumahist state. They also provided the roots to much of the radical anticolonial politics that would come of age in the 1940s, ultimately finding, at least in the African context, their most forceful expression in the organization and demands of the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress. As a result, this chapter aims to contextualize the “world of Kwame Nkrumah” and what would eventually emerge as the politics of the Convention People’s Party as part of a broader, global trend in early twentieth-century anticolonial politics. Meanwhile, within the Gold Coast itself, the colony’s own political traditions had roots of their own. As subsequent chapters will show, past and contemporary protests over land, colonial policies,

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